With the explosive growth of business to business (B2B) eCommerce, the Internet presents incredible opportunities for businesses of all sizes. For example, business to business (B2B) eCommerce provides opportunities to find new customers, to streamline supply chains, to provide new services, and to secure financial gain.
Organizations that have moved their business online are already realizing significant economic and competitive gains, such as increased revenue, lowered costs, new customer relationships, innovative branding opportunities, and the creation of new lines of customer service.
The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is becoming the de-facto standard for describing the format and the meaning of electronic data in a portable way. One of XML's most wide spread use is to use XML in communication between multiple parties that need to send and receive data among each other in order to accomplish a particular task. These parties can be, for example, programs or systems.
For example, a sending party formats specific data according to an agreed specification and sends the formatted data to the receiving party. The receiving party, in turn, parses the data and uses the parsed data for further executions. Within XML framework, the agreed specification used for specifying the format and content of exchanged data is described with XML Schema.
Typically, the description or specification of the XTL Schema is stored in a special file.
In order for this communication scheme to operate, each party needs to have a mechanism for correctly generating and correctly parsing the communication messages. It is noted that these tasks are required to be performed by all parties involved in the communication regardless of any further specific execution performed by a particular party. Typically, each party has a software module that converts some kind of internal representation of the data, which may be specific for each involved party, to an external representation (e.g., a specified communication message in XML format) and vice versa (i.e., converts the external representation to an internal representation).
When a conversion module (e.g., an implementation of an XML message API) is implemented in a Java language, the most natural way for internal representation of the data is a Java object. One challenge is that programmers currently must manually write code (i.e., implement the conversion module that converts from Java objects to XML messages and vice versa). As can be appreciated, substantial effort and cost are needed to manually write code to perform these conversion tasks. This effort and cost escalate as the number of communication standards and formats increase since a new conversion code must be developed for each type of different communication standard and revisions thereof.
Based on the foregoing, there remains a need for a method and system for automatically compiling a mark-up language message definition into source code that overcomes the disadvantages of the prior art as set forth previously.